Sales Management Operating Rhythm: What It Is and Why You Need It

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle

The best leaders in the world are successful because they are able to align everyday company activities to their core revenue objectives. How do they do that? The answer is the Management Operating Rhythm (MOR). The MOR is a major way that organizations support their sales managers, outlining the actions necessary for repeatable success and holding them accountable to perform them consistently and at a high level. The operating rhythm helps leaders connect their role to the company’s strategy and execute the plan of action without getting bogged down in administrative burdens.

Unfortunately, most companies don’t have a Management Operating Rhythm to make sure that their sales managers and their sales teams can be successful. You may have a certain cadence set for manager reviews, but is there consistency across the company with how these are executed? Do your managers have a clear idea of how to lead planning efforts and coach deals to ensure maximum revenue in every opportunity? Without a strong operating rhythm, there may be revenue falling through the cracks.

What is a Management Operating Rhythm?

The Management Operating Rhythm is a framework of activities, guidelines, tools, and success measures that helps sales leaders and managers focus on the most important aspects of their jobs—hiring the right team, driving consistent sales planning, coaching deal execution and providing visibility both up and down the organization. 

A great Management Operating Rhythm:

• Defines the critical activities for success
• Ensures strategic priorities are carried out in day-to-day management activities
• Provides a framework for what managers should be focused on daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly 
• Consistent process to gain line-of-sight into team’s effectiveness

The MOR creates a cadence around the critical management activities that have the greatest impact on the bottom line. It contains an inventory of the tools, developed to assist managers in successfully completing these activities. Sales teams that operate within this cadence remain committed to elevating performance and driving sales revenue.

Why Do I Need a Management Operating Rhythm?

A great sales Management Operating Rhythm improves the business in three main areas:

1. Corporate visibility: Most organizations struggle to see how their topline strategy is being enacted at the day-to-day level. By creating a cadence for communication, coaching and feedback, a channel of visibility is opened for C-level leaders and stakeholders to measure adoption, attribute results and course-correct if needed. The operating rhythm is essential for defining how expectations will be communicated so that everyone is working toward a common goal.
2. Talent management: Talent is the only sustainable competitive advantage, and talent challenges can be a major obstacle to growth, as shared by the CEO of Rubrik, a Force Management client. Hiring, onboarding and developing talent is how successful organizations scale their business. The operating rhythm is critical for leaders, managers and employees to know what is expected of them in terms of hiring to the right success profile and teaching and leading themselves and others. A great MOR will help you consistently recruit, onboard, and retain top performers to ensure your talent grows with your organization.
3. Sales planning and execution: Managers need to be able to do a great job coaching their sales reps with the entire business and competitive landscape – territory planning, account planning and opportunity execution. The operating rhythm is the guidepost for what is expected, for both opportunities and challenges. It provides the plan of attack to help your team consistently maximize revenue across all territories and accounts.

Overall, the key advantage of the MOR is optimizing your firm for growth. As a leader at any level, the best way to get the investment and confidence needed to push your team to the next stage of growth is to consistently hit revenue targets. Having a repeatable sales manager process that’s proven to deliver revenue makes leadership bullish about taking risks and investing in the future. The MOR ensures predictability by not only clearly defining your sales process but also enabling managers to consistently onboard and coach—streamlining sales productivity.

How Do I Implement a Management Operating Rhythm?

Establishing a sales operating rhythm and getting your team on board can be a complex process. Consider these three actions as you begin to think about your MOR:

1. Start with you
   A management cadence or sales coaching operating rhythm is often most effective when it starts from the front. Leaders can lay the groundwork for a sales coaching cadence by first developing a cadence for themselves and sharing it with sales management.
2. Define the when and the what
   As you develop a manager cadence, think about a few things that will be the most important for your teams to do/apply to every opportunity to drive your core revenue objectives. Whether it’s pipeline gen, moving deals through the funnel, capturing high-value opportunities, etc. — define two or three things that will make an impact on your biggest priorities and help your managers build a cadence around that. Then, find ways to drive accountability to ensure these sessions happen and are valuable for those involved.
3. Provide the how
   It’s easy to say, “Help sellers to close bigger deals.” More difficult is equipping managers with skills and tools to actually execute on those objectives. Remember, coaching is a skill entirely separate from selling. Your sales managers may understand how to close great deals, but they need to build the coaching muscle. It’s important to invest in making your sales managers great coaches.

At Force Management, we work with our clients to build out a custom framework that clearly defines a repeatable process for sales planning, opportunity coaching, and deal reviews to drive consistent revenue. At AthenaHealth, that process helped drive a 54% increase in the Meeting-to-Win ratio.